by Madelyn Alt
“What they think is not important. I have done nothing wrong.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What was going on?
Hester must have noted my curiosity, because she threw a glance my way and clammed up, at least on that subject. “As you can see, Eli, I’m doing fine. Things are fine here.” Her daughter, a sweet-faced little thing in a dark-hued pinafore, tugged on her skirt. Hester picked up her daughter and held her, hugging her close. Cheek to cheek they stared at us, a united front. “We’re all fine.”
So, basically, everything was fine. That was reassuring. Too bad repeated assertions generally proved the opposite when all was said and done.
Eli met my gaze. I knew he was thinking the same thing.
But Eli was a gentleman in Amish clothing, and if Hester didn’t want to talk about her troubles, he would respect her wishes. “That is good. But if you need anything, you will send someone over, ja?”
She didn’t look at him, but she nodded. “Is there anything else that you needed, Eli? It was too far to have come just to check up on me.”
The Amish concept of too far I found more than a little amusing. It couldn’t have been more than two miles. “It was because of me, actually,” I said to get Eli off the hook.
“You?”
“Well, me, and Junior here. Eli thought she might belong to you.” I stepped aside and opened the car door. Junior bounded out, all sixty pounds of exuberance and energetic doggie joy. She danced around us all, ears bouncing, tail wagging, rump shaking.
“Peaches!” the little girl cried out, and reached both arms toward the dog. “Peaches, Peaches!”
She wouldn’t stay in her mother’s arms any longer, so Hester set her down on her feet. The dog immediately bowled her over as she bumped against the child in her efforts to lick every inch of the girl’s plump cheeks, much to her giggling delight. The girl couldn’t have been more than four years old. To see her joy, the sparkle in her eyes, the way that she threw her arms around the dog’s neck and clung as though she would never let go…
I knelt down as well, smiling through the tears that clouded my vision. “Peaches, huh? I didn’t know what to call her. I’m glad she’s yours. I don’t think she liked being called Junior much.”
“Thank you for bringing her back to us,” Hester said, an honest smile touching her lips for the first time since we’d arrived. “She often followed Luc if he would let her. We thought she was lost for good after she did not come home the day that…We thought…The children were frantic. Where on earth did you find her?”
“Actually, she was terrorizing a woman on the edge of town. I took her in because I was a little afraid the woman might freak out and hurt her or something,” I told her. “She was holed up in the woman’s barn, I guess, and she seemed to be afraid of her.”
“Peaches doesn’t bite!” the little girl piped up in defense of her pet. “Peaches is a good doggie!”
As though to prove her point, Peaches reached back toward me and snuffled my hand, rolling her head into the attention with slobbering adulation.
“Yes, honey, Peaches is a good doggie. Some people are just afraid of doggies,” I told her.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They just are. Peaches is a special doggie, did you know that? She has six toes on her feet.”
“Of course she does. Did you know I can count to six? I can count to six hundred. But my brother Jude can’t, and he is six. I’m only almost five.”
“Hannah,” her mother admonished. “You’re bragging.”
Little girls were so funny. I leaned down to her and said, “Wow, that’s really smart of you. Did you know most doggies don’t have that many toes?”
“All our doggies do. They’re really special. Mama says they came with her from Pen—Pen—” She pursed her mouth in a thoughtful corkscrew. “Where was that again, Mama?”
“Never mind, Hannah,” Hester said, giving her daughter a motherly pat on the rump. “Why don’t you go out to the barn and get Peaches some of her food? She might be hungry.”
“Okay, Mama,” the little girl said. “Come on, Peaches! Come on!”
A happy girl, a happy dog, a happy mother. My work here was done.
I watched Hannah head toward the big red barn, the dog trailing along behind her. It was an idyllic scene—a beautiful child, adoring dog trotting at her heels, the tidy house and yard, the lovely old-style barn. Not some modern sheet metal monstrosity, this barn was made from wood—solid, adorned with white paint and…
Round signs over its big doors.
The red paint on the barn was older and peeling, but the white signs were painted with great care with designs in bright colors. They reminded me a little of quilt patterns, many-pointed stars and pinwheels. But they also reminded me of the sign we’d found in the woods.
“Pretty,” I said, indicating them with a nod of my head.
“Thank you. The others in the Ordnung, they do not like them much, but they bring me peace. Luc always liked them.”
Luc. I offered Hester my hand. “I was so sorry to hear about your husband. It must be terrible, to lose him so young.”
Her lips quirked in a tight smile. The strain of the last days was taking its toll. I couldn’t help remembering how pretty she’d looked that day at the market. How much older she looked today. “Thank you. I appreciate the sentiment, but I assure you, we’ll be—”
“Fine.” I nodded. “Yes, I know. Listen, I have no right to say this, but something is compelling me to ask you. At the market that day, you said something to me. At the time it just seemed a little odd, but meeting you again today and looking back, well, it has gotten me to thinking, so I hope you’ll forgive me. That day, you mentioned something about ‘those who see.’ What did you mean?”
She looked over her shoulder to see how closely Eli was paying attention. “I think you know exactly what I meant.”
“You see things—feel things—too?”
She shrugged, but to me the answer was clear.
“You don’t have to worry about Eli,” I told her, smiling. “I don’t think he would see it as unusual at all. You see, he’s a bit of a sensitive as well.”
“My mother was a seer,” she whispered. “And I have seen things as well, ever since I was a little girl. And—with Luc—I saw it coming—I knew—”
“You knew he was going to die?”
“I knew something bad was going to happen. That’s all.”
But was it? Or did she know more? Because I couldn’t help remembering that day, picturing it in my mind’s eye. And the more I did, the more feelings I was starting to get. Maybe, had I not been so dead set against “feeling” and “experiencing,” had I not been quite so skittish about my abilities, maybe I would have picked up on things sooner.
I thought about it as I got in the car, and I was still thinking about it when I pulled up to Eli’s home ten minutes later.
“You’ve been quiet,” Eli remarked, his hand on the door handle.
I nodded. “Sorry about that. I was just thinking…”
“About Luc.”
A statement, not a question. Yes, without a doubt, Eli was one who saw. “Eli, you knew him better than most people, I would guess.”
“Ja, I would guess I knew him well enough.”
“What was he like, as a person?”
Eli half smiled, half frowned. “Luc was Luc. A man. Not without sin—we none of us are without sin, especially not men. Luc and Hester…well, I don’t think he knew what he had in Hester. She was a good wife to him. A good mother. Luc wasn’t always…a good husband. But he was trying to be, I think.”
Did that mean the same thing in the Amish world as it did in the usual sense? Did he beat her? Cheat on her? Fail to support her in a way befitting a wife? What?
What sins did Luc have?
I thought I knew.
I saw him in my mind’s eye. There in the sunshine on market day, all burnished hair, straight white smile, ruddy lips, hooded eyes.
Arms and shoulders and thighs bulging into eternity. Everywhere he moved, female eyes followed. They couldn’t not follow. It would have been like opposing a powerful force of nature.
And his eyes…they had been wise. Knowing. Accepting of his power.
He knew he was attractive to the female sex.
I had seen it in the way he had looked at me.
An invitation? Or a challenge?
And Hester knew him, better than anyone. Did she know his true nature? Could that have been the reason for her confrontation of him that afternoon? I thought back to the scene that we had witnessed, Marcus, Liss, and I. How distraught she was over what he had insisted was “a simple job” that would be “just for the afternoon.”
She knew. And she was afraid of losing him.
I was betting on it. Generally speaking, a woman at the very least suspects these things. Even if she doesn’t want to admit it.
And Hester knew something about the symbols, too. She’d said as much when I asked her about the many-pointed stars on the Metzger barn.
Could magick have been used in Luc’s murder?
Could Hester herself have been involved?
“I am worried about her.”
Eli’s sudden admission surprised me. I turned my attention to him, still sitting, as I was, within Christine’s confines, staring into space.
“She is headstrong, that one. And she does not entirely fit in with our Amish here. She was an outsider when she married Luc, and she never learned to…” His voice trailed off, and he frowned. “Our women, they can be hard. Unyielding. Hester was too much her own person. She was different.”
There was an edge to his tone that I’d never heard before. Admiration. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought…but she was his friend’s wife. Eli would never have a thing for his friend’s wife.
Would he?
He was a man.
A feeling man.
And he didn’t have to act upon his feelings. That was something I knew he would never have done. But people cannot help having the feelings they have. They can only own them and find a way to live with and deal with them.
“Why are you so worried? Hester seems to have a handle on things.” Better than I would have done in the same situation, that was for sure.
Eli’s big, calloused hands worried the frayed edge of his Carhartt jacket, surprisingly gentle. “The women have turned their backs on her. It is as I thought it might be. They won’t help her.”
“I don’t understand why—”
“They think she has turned away from God because of her ways. They blame her.”
“For Luc?”
“And for other things. Cows that have dried up, or milk spoiling in the cans. Sick hogs. Chickens that won’t give eggs.”
I raised my brows and gaped at him. “You’re kidding me! Aren’t you? In this day and age?”
He shrugged. “Amish are afraid of Hexencraft, too.”
Hexencraft. As in hexes. As in curses.
Hester.
Hester?
“How can they blame her for Luc?” I asked him. “Wasn’t Hester home at the time Luc went missing?
“Ja. She took the children home. But the women, they think that somehow she invited his death. That she brought it down upon him and upon their family. And they think she is hexing the whole community, bringing shame down upon us all.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
I thought about Hester all the way back to town. I felt connected to her, in a way. An outsider with abilities, living in an unsympathetic world. I wanted to believe that her only crime had been choosing to wed a man unworthy of her affections. A man she could not trust to be faithful to her, if what Eli intimated was true.
Because she had known. How did she live with that? How did she look him in the eye, day after day, knowing that he had been with another woman? Or women?
Maybe she hadn’t lived with it. Maybe in her way she had done what she could to change her life.
Maybe she had done magic. Or worse.
I didn’t like the thought. But what if somehow, in some way, she was involved?
Chapter 14
I had a surprise waiting for me at the store when I got back. Marion Tabor had arrived at the shop during my absence and had made an instant friend in Liss. The two were chatting away over tall cups of latte, hold the sprinkles, at the counter.
“Marion!” I said as I came around the corner and caught sight of her. I went to her and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in here before. Did you just now decide to check out our wares, or is this a social call?”
“Neither,” Marion said, setting down her cup. “As I was just telling Liss here”—Liss? My, my, they had become fast friends—“the activity at the library has been at an all-time high since you and Marcus came by the other night. I’m surprised the patrons have been as blind as they seem to be. The closest anyone has come to saying anything about it is a gentleman who suggested we might think about having a plumber come out. Seems he’d been in the men’s bathroom, and Bertie and company decided to have a little fun with him by flushing the toilets—one, two, three, four, right down the line. The question is, was the patron seated at the time? That’s what I want to know.”
She had a wicked twinkle in her eye at that. I couldn’t help laughing. “You, madam, are terrible.”
“Hey, the library gig can get a little dry, if a girl doesn’t learn how to let down her hair from time to time.”
“Laughter is the stuff of life,” Liss agreed solemnly.
“Hear, hear. And so is research. Well, it is to a librarian,” Marion said in all seriousness. “Speaking of which, that brings me to the real reason I came by. I found this in a dusty old tome in the basement of the Historical Society. From a history of the Rhodes family, formerly a family of note in Stony Mill.” Reaching down, she lifted a pink leopard-print canvas tote bag, the depths of which could have hidden a real-life, nonpink leopard, to her ample lap. From inside it she withdrew a lined yellow legal pad, page upon page filled with copious notes in her fine hand.
She settled her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose, cleared her throat, and began to read:
November 12, 1908—The library continues to be a resounding success and a great source of pleasure for me, as well as for our patrons. I am so very fortunate that Great-Uncle Gerald was able to influence the board on my behalf despite my age and inexperience; otherwise I might never have been allowed this opportunity to prove my value to this community as their very first librarian. Thank you, thank you, Uncle G!
Of course there is the slightest of problems in the boiler room—very slight—but that will all be sorted out eventually, I have the utmost of confidence in that regard. If nothing else, by next June at the latest! A June bride, can you imagine? My dearest Elliott will be so proud. Mummy is taking me to Chicago for the holidays. My trousseau shall be the best this town has ever seen. And to be presented on Elliott’s arm as his wife, there will be nothing finer.
Marion looked at us from over her reading glasses. Expectantly.
“Kudos,” I said as politely and supportively as possible. “Right up your alley, too. You’ve always loved being in the know about Stony Mill history.”
Marion squinted at me to decide whether I was joking. “Yes, yes, of course. Be that as it may, you’re missing my point.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I walked around the counter and poured myself a cup of orange pekoe, spicing it up with a dash of cinnamon and a dollop of honey. “Er, what was your point? Not that it wasn’t interesting or anything,” I hastened to assure her.
Marion exchanged a help me? glance with Liss, who seemed to have gotten it.
“The point, ducks,” Liss explained, “is that the excerpt is from the personal diary of the town’s first librarian. A very young woman, with a problem in the boiler room.”
Perhaps I was dim, but…“Bertie? But he couldn’t have been a ghost back t
hen, could he? The library was only built in 1907, if I remember the plaque on the wall correctly, and the fire in the boiler room—didn’t that take place in 1909?”
“March of 1909, in fact,” Marion clarified, waiting for me to make the connections my brain was so obviously missing out on.
“So,” I said, my brain slowly whirring, “Bertie’s ghost wasn’t the problem in the boiler room. It was Bertie himself? Live and in person?”
“Bingo!” Marion rifled through her bag, coming up with a folder from which she pulled a photocopy of a grainy, very old-style newspaper article. “Got this from the archives of The Gazette.”
She passed it over to me. I scanned the article, which seemed to be a description of the fire that overwhelmed the lower level of the library in March of 1909, starting in the boiler room. A great number of volumes had been lost due to water and smoke damage. The article called for donations from the community to help renovate the damaged structure and to replace as many books as they could.
It also listed among the casualties one Bertram R. Norris of 710 East State Street
, Stony Mill, aged forty-eight years. Boiler Room Bertie.
“The man was certainly tragic,” I said. “First he falls for the young librarian, who is promised to another man, and then he dies in a freak fire. What a life.”
“Oh, he didn’t die in the fire,” Marion said. “That was the story passed around in legend, but it wasn’t true. He was injured, yes, but he didn’t die for another ten years. I have his obit here somewhere,” she said, rifling some more. “But take a look at the only fatality listed in the article, farther down.”
I read the last few paragraphs more thoroughly. There it was, in the second to last paragraph. Miss Helen Rhodes, aged twenty years, seven months.
“Helen was the librarian? The girl in the diary?” I breathed deeply of the truth and closed my eyes. My chest felt tight, hot. The photocopy began to shake in my hand. What was I doing to myself? I shook it off and opened my eyes. “She never married her Elliott. She died in the fire—”
“That started in the boiler room. And I think she’s still there at the library. It was home to her. She never made a life with Elliott, never had children. The library, the books, they were her passion.” Marion was getting into the discussion, a light of zeal shining in her eyes. “The fire—do you think that Bertie started it? Is that why he’s still there? Out of guilt? Or because Helen is also there? Or is it because his presence is keeping her there, somehow? Keeping her from, what do you call it? Moving on?”
